Happy Canada Day!

I couldn’t let the day go by without posting some tribute to my new homeland. Time doesn’t permit some well thought out paean to Canada from my own pen, so here instead are a few words from (of all places) Britain’s Sunday Telegraph a few years ago:-

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada’s entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the “British”. The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign which the US had clearly not participated – a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and film-makers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality – unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer British. It is as if in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakeably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves – and are unheard by anyone else – that 1 per cent of the world’s population has provided 10 per cent of the world’s peace-keeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peace-keepers on earth – in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peace-keeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement which has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace – a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the US knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

Finally, a few quotes about Canada that I wish I’d thought of:-

I think every Canadian should have a map of Canada in his or her house. It should be displayed in a place where one can sit and contemplate the wonderful vastness of this land. As Canadians we are continuously groping for an identity and a sense of love for our nation. We grapple with the concept, find it somewhat distasteful and leave it for another day. We find American flag waving, hand over heart while belting out Oh, say, can you see… too much and avoid doing the same. We admire their national spirit, but Canadians are, in contrast, understated. To understand the identity that exists in our hearts think of our sweepingly majestic home, its quiet, serene beauty. A beauty recognizable to us all. We are proud of this nation and of who we are. We just don’t say it. It’s like the map. It just sits there on the wall displaying the lines of our coasts, the bulk of our waterways, and the breadth of our northern territories. Surveying all of this leaves me in awe. It brings a tear to my eye…O Canada… – Debora O’Neil

In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations, it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir. Stuart Keate

Canada is probably the most free country in the world where a man still has room to breathe, to spread out, to move forward, to move out, an open country with an open frontier. Canada has created harmony and cooperation among ethnic groups, and it must take this experience to the world because there is yet to be such an example of harmony and cooperation among ethnic groups. Valentyn Moroz

The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear. Will Ferguson

Many Canadian nationalists harbour the bizarre fear that should we ever reject royalty, we would instantly mutate into Americans, as though the Canadian sense of self is so frail and delicate a bud, that the only thing stopping it from being swallowed whole by the US is an English lady in a funny hat…With or without the Royals, we are not Americans. Nor are we British. Or French. Or Void. We are something else. And the sooner we define this, the better. Will Ferguson

Canada is like your attic, you forget that it’s up there, but when you go, it’s like “Oh man, look at all this great stuff!” – Anon.

There are no limits to the majestic future which lies before the mighty expanse of Canada with its virile, aspiring, cultured, and generous-hearted people. Winston Churchill

Happy 142nd Birthday, Canada!

The Negotiating Table

A book I am currently reading to develop my negotiation skills, Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell, starts with an interesting  thought experiment to determine the reader’s negotiation style.

You are one of ten strangers in a room sitting at a round table. Someone walks into the room and offers a thousand dollars to the first two people who can persuade the person sitting opposite them to stand up, walk round the table and stand behind their chair. Everyone else will walk away empty handed. You need to think quick, before someone else succeeds in the task. What is your strategy?

Shell suggests that a person’s response is a good indicator of their negotiating style.

An ‘avoider’ will be reluctant to take part in the exercise, fearing looking silly, suspecting a trick, or being unable to consider the possibility of being able to persuade the other party to walk round the table.

A ‘compromiser’ see the possibility of offering $500 to the person sitting opposite if they run around the table. This is the most common solution to the problem (and the one I came up with). Shell points out that, in practice, it is often difficult to reach agreement on who should do the running, however. People fear they may be tricked and would prefer the other party to move. The time it takes for this secondary negotiation may cost both parties the prize.

The  person beating the compromisers may be an ‘accommodator’ who, having listened to the problem, sees time as of the essence and immediately runs around the table and stands behind the other person’s chair. They risk being able to convince their opposite number to share the spoils after the event, trusting in the better nature of the other party.

A ‘competitor’ will try to gain as much of the full thousand dollars by any means necessary. At the most unscrupulous level, this may mean making promises to their counterpart which they later try to back out of, or making excuses to prevent them from having to run round the table to ensure the other party does.

Finally, the best overall solution may be attained by the ‘problem solver’. This person immediately starts running, and shouts at the other person to do the same as, if you both do so, you both stand to win $1,000 without having to do so.

The experiment is instructive because it indicates an important dimension to negotiating which is often overlooked. In negotiation situations our first focus is often on how we can get as big a slice of the pie as possible, which means we perceive any gain as being at the expense of the other party. This mode of thinking can lead to a highly adversarial form of negotiation where each side sees depriving the opponent as the only way to succeed. This puts off many people from trying to make a deal, as they see it as a highly competitive, distasteful process. Successful negotiators, Shell argues, don’t fall for this fallacy, and instead look for opportunities to increase the overall size of the pie, as in the above example where the problem solver sees $2,000 at stake for the two parties rather than $1,000.

Practical situations are rarely as cut and dried as the one above. Shell points out, however, that giving full consideration to the other party’s interests and how they may coincide with your own will often provide insights to make the negotiation process smoother and potentially more beneficial to both parties. He uses everyday shopping as a simple example. Those who fail to fully consider the priorities of the merchant will be reluctant to haggle, as they will fail to give sufficient consideration to the seller’s desire to keep a customer happy. His students have discovered that merely asking for a discount from a retailer will often result in a reduction of price without any need to haggle, as the retailer will consider a reasonable discount a price worth paying to make a customer happy.

Shell’s book is great at providing a theoretical framework upon which to build one’s negotiation style and strategy, and also contains plenty of practical examples and advice on how to apply the theories. To those who find bargaining a natural process this may be over the top and unnecessary, but to us lesser mortals, particularly those with a geeky penchant for underpinning theories and conceptual frameworks, it’s a very worthwhile read.

Uncertainty and its Discontents

Having recently read Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling Upon Happiness, I was pleased to find an article penned by him relaunching the New York Times’ Happy Days blog.

It was in ‘Stumbling Upon Happiness’ that I first read about the ‘change blindness’ experiments that I covered in my most recent post. In the book, Gilbert convincingly shows how our overestimation of our brain’s ability to effectively collect, process and evaluate data leads us to act in highly irrational and inconsistent ways in the pursuit of our own happiness. In particular, he demonstrates how bad we are at predicting how we will feel in the future. We consistently overestimate the happiness that riches and good fortune will bring us, as well as the unhappiness wrought by misfortune. Not only that, but our brains also seem to lack the ability to ever learn from such mistakes. You are probably be saying to yourself that this is no great revelation, but at the same time I would predict that you are as helpless as I am to convert your knowledge into a strategy to overcome the problem.

As an example of the paradoxes involved in predicting our own future happiness, Gilbert cites the example of a bride about to get married. If you asked her how she would feel if she was jilted at the altar, you would expect her to say that it would be her worst nightmare. And yet you could equally predict that if you asked a selection of brides who had been faced this nightmare a couple of years ago that a good number would say that it was the best thing that had ever happened to them.  They would likely report that they had narrowly escaped a marriage that was clearly wrong for them, and had since moved on to create a new life for themselves, perhaps finding a new partner who, in retrospect, is a much better choice. The bride-to-be, however, is highly unlikely to take such a long-term view into account when considering the effects of being left at the altar. It turns out that such ‘future blindness’ afflicts all of us on a pretty much constant basis.

Daniel Gilbert’s post in the New York Times shows how, in a similar fashion, uncertainty leaves us with a disproportionate degree of unhappiness compared to those who have no doubt of their fate:

Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.

That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.

[...]

Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

As my wife and I search for our first permanent work since arriving in Canada last October, we may occasionally be laid low for a couple of days by bad news of rejection following a promising interview, or from a temporary position not developing into something longer term but, by and large, I can imagine that our states of mind are healthier than many of those in fear of losing their jobs at the moment. Our optimism bounces back as soon as our focus returns to the possibilities in front of us. Applying for jobs is a process that spurs the imagination to what we could do if successful (getting our belongings out of storage and getting a place of our own, just for starters), and the mere process of writing nice things about oneself in résumés and cover letters seems to inject positivity.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how we would feel if we were both working for GM or Chrysler at the moment with the threat of unemployment hanging over both of our heads. We would likely be scared to death about ending up in the situation we are currently living in. It would be great if  had the mental wherewithal to learn something from this observation in order to avoid stresses in the future when I have more to lose. As Daniel Gilbert suggests, however, this is far easier said than done.

Inattentional Blindness

If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can find out the debilitating affects of inattentional blindness by taking the following test:

To be frank, I’m not sure how much this awareness of the shortcomings of our observational powers will help in avoiding collisions with bikes, but it does make you think of how much our brains fail to observe of what is going on around us. I am a particularly unobservant person, often failing to notice quite blatant household rearrangements that my wife has made in my absence, much to her chagrin and my embarrassment. On the other hand, I have a very keen eye for birds and other wildlife that often completely escappes the attention of others. It seems we all operate on different cognitive frequencies, but our brains all seem to only be able to process a selected edited highlights of what goes on around us. Here’s another experiment which discusses some of the cognitive science involved:

Finally, here’s a video showing Derren Brown exploiting this ‘change blindness’ to the extreme.

On a more serious note, around 20 cyclists are killed on London’s roads every year, over half by heavy goods vehicles. On a more practical note, Transport For London has issued 10,000 fresnel lenses to the capital’s freight operators. These lenses allow the driver to see below and behind the normal range of vision, which they hope will reduce serious accidents in the future. For the rest of us, I guess avoiding distractions (not using cellphones when driving is a particularly obvious example) and trying to be aware as possible of what is going on around us is the best advice although, ironically, the above experiments hint that the occasional ‘moonwalking bear’ will always occasionally evade our notice. All we can do is try to keep them to a minimum.

Othello on the Beach

For the first time in its nineteen year history, Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival is to include a production of Othello, having lined up black Canadian actor Michael Blake to play the role.

“It’s been an omission, no question,” says festival artistic director Christopher Gaze. “But I don’t think it got away from us, it’s purely been a question of finding the right actor. … There just aren’t enough black actors here in Vancouver,” he adds. “And to be able to play a part of this measure – if you’re black or of an ethnicity that would work – like any other part, you have to win it. This is a massive role – in scope and emotion – it’s very difficult.”

Ray Fearon as Othello

The greatest tragedy is that no black actors in the West of Canada have been considered good enough to play the role up to now, even if the role is considered one of the toughest in the repertoire.  Having played Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, British actor Ray Fearon commented:

People say Iago is the better role. But Othello is mammoth emotionally. I tell you, it finished me off. It demolished me physically. I had to have two months off afterwards and I grew up as a damn athlete!

Fearon’s performance was something of a watershed. Only ten years ago he became the first black actor to play the role in the main theatre at Stratford (although Ben Kingsley played the role without makeup as an Arab in 1985). Donald Sinden was the last white actor to perform the part in ‘blackface’ for the RSC in 1978.

Olivier: "My kingdom for a banjo!"

Even if one accepts the defeatist view that decent black Shakespearean actors are as rare as hens’ teeth, can it really ever be the best option to leave such a major play out of the repertoire? The theatre has always been a place where masks and disguises are worn and the audience is asked to suspend disbelief, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays. Many of his works originally featured men dressed as women dressed as men. There is no controversy when Shylock is played by a gentile, when Lear is played by a young man or, indeed, when black actors play Hamlet or Kings of England.

Clearly, casting the role of Othello causes more of a problem, as Othello’s racial difference inspires much of the fierce invective spoken by Iago and the rest of the supporting cast.  Perhaps the cleverest solution, was a 1997 production in Washington, D.C., in which Patrick Stewart played Othello with an otherwise entirely black cast. However, it is surely possible to find inventive solutions to the problem of how to allow a white man to play the role of a ‘moor’ without resorting to stereotypes and caricatures which have typified some of the famous performances of the last century (a New York Times critic said of Olivier’s film performance that :“You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out or start banging a tambourine.”)

If there is a moral to this story, it is surely that more black actors need to be seen major Shakespearean roles, but the let’s hope that this can be achieved without typecasting. Black actors don’t need to be confined to having Othello as their only opportunity at a leading Shakespearean role any more than Jewish actors would appreciate only playing Shylock, or Scottish actors being limited to Macbeth. Similarly, the theatre will suffer if, for reasons of political correctness totally inconsistent with the flexibility associated with casting other Shakespearean roles, Othello becomes the exclusive property of black actors.

The Runaway Bailout

That was January. This is now.

Some figures in yesterday’s Globe and Mail regarding the bailout of GM and Chrysler, and in particular the support of the pension funds, made for pretty shocking reading:

Ottawa and Toronto were already asking a lot of Canadians – most of whom have no private retirement fund and earn significantly less than auto assembly workers – by allowing some of the bailout money to go toward fixing an estimated $7-billion shortfall in GM Canada’s pension plan.

But with the latest forecast pegging the overall bailout bill at as much as $13.5-billion, or more than three times the original estimate, politicians are testing the limits of recession-racked Canadians’ tolerance and financial wherewithal. The ballooning bailouts are pushing Ottawa deeper into the red, with this year’s deficit projected to surpass $50-billion.

At General Motors of Canada Ltd. alone, the rescue package could amount to a staggering $1.4-million for every job saved, with no guarantee that the bailout will ensure the long-term survival of the company’s remaining auto assembly and engine plants.

I don’t have the latest figures on what GM workers earn, but two years ago the average gross hourly wage in the US was US$39.68 (£24.60 at current exchange rates), which becomes $73.26/hour (£45.42) when benefits are taken into account. In comparison, this latter figure is about $30 more per hour than the equivalent rates paid in US-based Japanese plants. The auto workers unions have made concessions as part of the negotiations with GM and Chrysler to bring their wages closer to those in Japanese plants, but the question remains as to how the average tax payer, who is likely to be receiving very little support in their industry of employment and to be earning considerably less than the wage rates mentioned above, is left paying $1.4 million per worker to the pension funds of mismanaged (and grossly overpaying) companies in one particular sector.

Unfortunately, the Government of Ontario doesn’t come out of this affair in a particularly good light. In 1992 Ontario decided to exempt companies with over CAN$500 million in assets from its plans to force all companies to fully fund their pension schemes, under the assumption that such companies were ‘too big to fail’. The Canadian Auto Workers union is now arguing that the Ontario Government was negligent, and is on the hook for the shortfall. Although the government has claimed not to have the money to fund the amount, recent reports suggest that either the provincial and/or the national government are likely to end up footing the bill.

The automakers’ lobbyists also haven’t been slow to take advantage of the industry’s geographical spread across the US-Canadian border. If one government played ball and the other one didn’t, you could expect a massive migration of automotive supply chain across the frontier. In the end, Stephen Harper, not a man with a great history of supporting government intervention in the private sector, felt he had no choice but to hold his nose and match Obama’s guarantees or see vast swathes of southern Ontario jobs disappear into thin air. Since that time, the bailout sum has ballooned to potentially three times the amount originally anticipated.

Canadians, and particularly those living in Ontario, will be paying for the bailouts in tax rises and government cutbacks for many years to come, and given the automakers’ previous reneging on promises, there is little guarantee that the money will see a long term future for GM and Chrysler in Canada. GM’s workforce in Ontario has fallen from 20,000 five years ago to 14,000 in advance of the recent difficulties, and a planned 7,000 by next year, not taking into account any further cut backs deemed necessary in the forthcoming bankruptcy proceedings. The argument goes, however, that there are more than just the jobs at GM and Chrysler at stake. Both companies would be likely to bring down much of their supply chains with them if they disappeared or relocated, and as a result would endanger production at the other car manufacturing plants in Ontario.

Surely, however, the costs of supporting the affected automotive suppliers in order to guarantee continued supply to Ford, Honda and Toyota, and of retraining and sensibly compensating those thrown out of work by the exodus/collapse of GM and Chrysler would be considerably lower than the mind-boggling sums now under consideration and, perhaps more importantly in the long run, would avoid the dangerous precedent set by such lavish rewarding of failure and excess.

Hedgehogs and foxes at The Guardian

Two opinion pieces in the Guardian this week on the subject of swine flu influenza A (H1N1) provided an interesting example of Philip Tetlock’s classification of good and bad pundits as ‘foxes’ and ‘hedgehogs’, as I outlined in another recent post.

On Wednesday, Simon Jenkins published a column entitled “Swine Flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend”. Here are some extracts:-

Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.

The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being “ready” for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is “ready” for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.

[...]

During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists’ hysteria, that BSE “has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons”, led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers’ compensation.[...] This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have “a 25% chance of killing tens of millions”. The press duly headlined a plague “worse than Aids”. Not one Briton died.

The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that “it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century”. The WHO issued a statement that “one in four Britons could die”.

Simon Jenkins is an arch-cynic. This often serves him well, making his columns iconoclastic and insightful. Having cynicism as your default setting, however, is sometimes going to result in wrong-headed opinions such as those in this piece.

His insistence that health specialists should avoid using words like ‘possibly, potentially, should and might’ clearly indicates his pedigree as a columnist. While pundits may use the illusion of certainty to talk up the importance of their opinions and predictions, it would be utterly irresponsible of the WHO and other medical experts to speak in terms of certainty about a newly discovered virus with an inherently chaotic infection pattern. Also note that later in the article Jenkins criticises John Oxford for stating that avian flu ‘will be’ the first pandemic of the 21st century. Would Jenkins have preferred that he hedged his bets with a ‘potentially’ or a ‘might’? It seems difficult to win in Simon Jenkins’ eyes.

He then criticises the WHO for stating that the world is ‘ready’ for a flu pandemic, and for scaremongering. I presume what he is referring to is the WHO’s Keiji Fukuda’s comments on Monday:

“I believe that the world is much, much better prepared than we have ever been for dealing with this kind of situation[...] The past five years have put us in (the) best possible position to handle this kind of situation.”

Jenkins can’t have it both ways. If the WHO are stating that the world is ready, surely that is reassuring, not scaremongering. When he goes on to mention the BSE, SARS and avian flu scares, he is talking as if scientists at the time had the perfect knowledge to predict that the diseases wouldn’t spread. At least in the last two instances, without extremely risk averse containment procedures, things could have been a lot worse. The millions of deaths in the 1918 pandemic are surely sufficient reason to act with extreme caution and present people with the pandemic scenario in order that they take seriously the necessary simple steps (frequent washing of hands, for example) that can impede the spread of the virus.

On Wednesday, common sense returned to the Guardian’s pages in a piece by Ben Goldacre, whose ‘Bad Science‘ column and website have tagged him as an arch-enemy of overhyped scientific claims:-

Just like with Sars, and bird flu, and MMR, is this all hype? The answer is no, but more interesting is this: for so many people, their very first assumption on the story is that the media are lying. It is the story of the boy who cried wolf.

We are poorly equipped to think around issues involving risk, and infectious diseases epidemiology is a tricky business: the error margins on the models are wide, and it’s extremely hard to make clear predictions.
[...]
All people have done is raise the possibility of things really kicking off, and they are right to do so, but we don’t have brilliantly accurate information. Someone has said that up to 40% of the world could be infected. Is that scaremongering? Well it’s high, and I’m sure it’s a bit of a guess, but maybe up to 40% could be. Annoying, isn’t it, not to know.

Someone has said 120 million could die. Well I suppose they could: I’m sure it was done on the back of an envelope, by guessing how many would be infected, and what proportion would die, but I don’t think anyone’s pretending otherwise.
[...]
By Tuesday, pundit-seekers from the media were suddenly contacting me, a massive nobody, to say that swine flu is all nonsense and hype, like some kind of blind, automated naysaying device. “Will you come and talk about the media overhyping swine flu?” asked Case Notes on Radio 4. No. “We need someone to say it’s all been overhyped,” said BBC Wales.

[...] Simon Jenkins suggested the same thing. It’s not true, I said. They were risks, risks that didn’t materialise, but they were still risks. That’s what a risk is. I’ve never been hit by a car, but it’s not idiotic to think about it. Simon Jenkins won’t be right if nobody dies, he’ll be lucky, like the rest of us.

Goldacre and Jenkins are both known for calling out BS in their columns, but Goldacre isn’t defined by his skepticism. He can easily slip from his default mode to a robust defence of the coverage of the potential pandemic. While Jenkins appears the one-dimensional cynical hedgehog, Goldacre proves himself to be the multi-faceted fox.

It is, of course, very possible that this won’t be as bad as is feared, but as long as it can’t be ruled out, it makes a lot of sense for people and institutions to take practical steps to be ready just in case. This isn’t a bogus threat or conspiracy theory. This is a regular punctuation mark throughout the course of human history.

Although much is uncertain at the moment, the breakout of the disease in Mexico means that looking at the situation down there gives at least some of idea of how things could be elsewhere in the world very soon if the virus continues to spread unabated. Unfortunately, the statistics coming out of Mexico are very unclear. The difference between confirmed and suspected deaths is large, and even the confirmed figure seems to go down as well as up. I personally suspect that the number of actual cases in Mexico is much higher. We may only seeing the tip of the iceberg – the extreme cases which have been reported. As we know, the symptoms in those returning from Mexico have been mild. If they had contracted the virus at home, how many would have gone to the doctor, and how many of those would have been tested? I imagine that many minor cases in Mexico have gone unreported for similar reasons.

This would potentially explain two anomalies: firstly, the high death rate in Mexico. If the infection rate was much higher than reported, this would bring the death rate down to a much more statistically understandable level, meaning that many more cases would be needed outside Mexico before a proper comparison could be made. Secondly, it would make more sense of the rate of infection among those returning from Mexico compared with the rate within the country. If I’m right, this would suggest a high infection rate but with a much lower mortality rate than currently reported in Mexico. Of course, I’m no expert and this is just a homespun theory. I’m just trying to make sense of some perplexing inconsistencies in the stats. I’d be interested to know what others think.

The Importance of Mindset

I have written before about Martin Seligman’s discovery of the phenomenon of learned helplessness. His experiments demonstrated that when animals or people are subjected to unavoidable pain or distress, around two-thirds of subjects seem to lose the capacity to take advantage of subsequent opportunities to improve their situation. The remaining one-third, however, are immune to the effect.

Seligman’s experiments were important because they proved that an individual’s mindset is an important factor in influencing behaviour, an idea which had been rejected by mainstream psychology up to that point. Seligman’s subsequent work in defining the explanatory styles that both led to learned helplessness and provided immunity to it led to the development of  methods of treatment, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which could be used to change an individual’s core beliefs and, thus, avoid extreme effects, such clinical depression.

Carol Dweck

At the time of this ‘cognitive’ revolution in psychology, Carol Dweck was a graduate student at Yale. She was particularly interested in how Seligman’s observations could be interpreted in an educational context. She was aware that some children seemed to be paralysed by failure, while others were motivated by it. Based on her research, she developed a theory that a student’s belief regarding whether his or her abilities were fixed or subject to change was crucial to educational development. The differences between the ‘fixed’ and ‘growth’ mindsets are clearly illustrated by this diagram.

In a breakthrough study in 1975 she took a group of elementary school students who were having difficulties with mathematical problems. Half of the group were coached to believe that their brains worked like muscles, which could grow stronger with more effort, and that working hard would enable them to solve the problems. The other ‘control group’ did not receive the training. The  group that received the growth-mindset coaching quickly made progress, learning to solve the problems which continued to elude the uncoached control group.

Dweck found that it wasn’t just failure itself that created learning difficulties for children with fixed mindsets. Among successful pupils, fear of failure was also a potential problem. When fixed-mindset kids were told how smart they were, this seemed to create a disincentive for them to learn more, in case future failure tarnished their ’smart’ image. In his article The Talent Myth, which chronicles how an unrestrained ‘talent culture’ led to the collapse of Enron, Malcolm Gladwell describes an experiment of Dweck’s which highlights how the fixed-mindset can lead talented individuals astray:-

Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren’t naturally deceptive people, and they weren’t any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate “talent.” They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences.

Dweck’s conclusion based on her research is that teachers and parents who praise children for their talents rather than their efforts could lead them to fear and avoid failure, rather than seeing it as a necessary part of the learning process. As the extract from Gladwell’s essay shows, in extreme cases, it can even encourage them to lie rather than admit to failure.

In recent decades the importance of a child’s self-esteem in educational achievement has had a strong influence on teaching methods. Dweck argues, however, that a ’self-esteem at all costs’ approach has diluted standards and left many children unchallenged and afraid to fail. Students may have felt good about themselves, but at the cost of lowered academic standards. Dweck emphasises the need to teach children that failure is part of the learning process, and that self-esteem is the by-product of overcoming challenges.

Dweck, who is now a professor of psychology at the University of Stanford, has provided an excellent overview of her work in her 2006 book Mindset. The book looks at the influence of mindset not only on education and parenting, but also in many other contexts including relationships, business and sports.

One important theme of the book is how an obsession with ‘natural’ talent can create barriers to those with fixed mindsets. Like Dweck, Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t believe in ‘The Natural’. In his most recent book, ‘Outliers’, he analyses a number of so-called natural talents including Bill Gates and The Beatles to show that their success was a result good fortune and hard work, without which talent alone would never have cut it. Gladwell quotes a rule of thumb of 10,000 hours of practice as a minimum for someone to become an expert in their chosen field, regardless of natural ability. Even Mozart, the most frequently cited child-prodigy, did not produce any masterpieces until he reached his twenties. Dweck believes that fixed mindsets inhibit people from finding out their true potential in a particular field because they perceive themselves as having not having enough natural talent to begin with.

The good news from Dweck’s research is that she has found that changing from one mindset to the other is quite easy given the right training. She has developed ‘Brainology‘, an online training course for schoolchildren, and also runs courses for business managers. Dweck has even become involved in sports psychology, working with English soccer team Blackburn Rovers and lecturing to the Scottish soccer establishment, including Scotland manager George Burley.

Thinking about how the concept of mindset applies to myself has been an interesting and surprising exercise for me. Looking at failure as a growth process has helped me to remain positive in the face of repeated rejection in the current job market. I also found that, upon reflection, I wasn’t quite as much of a ‘growth-mindset’ guy as I thought I was. I even noticed myself developing a fixed mindset about my possession of a growth mindset! I found that the further a growth mindset drives you forward, the bigger the risk of falling into a fixed mindset based on pride at one’s accomplishments.

The ultimate message from Dweck’s work is that defining oneself in concrete terms in any aspect of our lives puts limits on our potential, even if the definition is a positive one. By learning to enjoy the voyage of discovery on its own terms, including the opportunities for growth provided by the setbacks along the way, we can have a more fulfilling life with more potential for learning and achievement.

Black Swans and Red Herrings

Philip Tetlock: scourge of the experts

Thirty years ago at the University of Yale, psychologist Philip Tetlock witnessed an experiment which was to inspire his life’s work: an epic 20-year investigation, the results of which are highly surprising and hold important lessons for us all.

The set up of the experiment was not particularly novel: it involved a rat, a maze, some food and a group of students to observe the results. The rat was released into the maze and given a choice to go left or right at a T-junction. Food was placed to the left on 60% of occasions, and to the right the rest of the time. It didn’t take the rat long to work out that it was more likely to be found to the left than to the right, and it soon chose to go left each time, guaranteeing itself a snack on 60% of occasions.

But this wasn’t the real point of the experiment. At the same time the rat was working for its dinner, the students were also asked to guess on which side the food would be found (they weren’t aware of the set 60% ratio of lefts to rights). The students, in their search for a pattern, switched their predictions regularly between right and left, resulting in a success rate of 52%. The rat was thus declared to have greater predictive powers than a roomful of Yale students.

Tetlock wondered if these observations pointed to a wider problem in the human brain’s ability to predict the future, and whether this problem extended to predictions made by professional forecasters. He embarked on a 20 year odyssey to investigate the ability of these experts to anticipate future trends.

Tetlock studied the forecasts of 284 experts who made their living identifying political and economic trends, periodically asking them to make predictions relating to their fields of expertise. Rather than giving them yes/no questions, he asked them to assess probabilities, for example: ‘What are the chances of inflation in the UK rising, staying the same or falling in the next 12 months?’, or ‘Will casualties in the Israel-Palestine conflict fall, rise, or stay the same in the next year?’ He didn’t just ask for their opinions, but studied the basis of their decision and how they reacted when they were proven to be wrong. After 20 years on the project, Tetlock ended up with an enormous database of 82.361 expert predictions.

The project’s findings were astounding. Just like in the rat test, arbitrarily assigning equal probabilities to the ‘worse’, ’same’ and ‘better’ outcomes would have yielded more accurate predictions than those given by the ‘experts’. In Tetlock’s words, a dart-throwing chimp would have been as much help as the paid experts in predicting the future (although please don’t try this at home, kids).

Other studies into the reliability of economic forecasts have yielded similar results, indicating that basing your forecast on a repeat of the result in the previous period would be more accurate than professional forecasts. This is more than a little disconcerting. Even the most independent-minded of us relies on professional expertise to tell us what the future may bring.

What is it that prevents people who know a subject inside out from outperforming rats and chimps in predicting the future? Some clues can be found in Tetlock’s analysis of his results. He looked for what personal characteristics made his forecasters more or less likely to make good predictions. One trend he noticed was that there was a significant correlation with the fame of the person. The more famous they were, the worse their forecasts tended to be. He also found that, beyond a basic working knowledge, the more an expert knew on the subject they were making predictions about, the more likely their prediction was to be wrong.

What lies behind this highly counterintuitive finding? Tetlock suggests that the experts made similar mistakes to the Yale students. The more you think you know, the more you are likely to overanalyse a situation which is inherently unpredictable or subject to far simpler rules than those applied by the sophisticated forecaster. The more an expert has invested in their complicated theories and arcane knowledge, the more likely they are to unnecessarily apply it to their prediction.

Another contributing factor could be Black Swans. The concept comes originally from the work of philosopher John Stuart Mill, but was popularised by Karl Popper in his influential treatise “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, in which he dealt with the problem of induction. Induction is a process of thinking whereby a universal conclusion in reached on the basis of a limited number of observations. For anyone living in Europe prior to the discovery of Australia and New Zealand, the statement “all swans are white” would have seemed reasonable. If all the swans you and everyone you know and have ever encountered are white, it seems natural to assume it to be a universal fact that all swans are white – until, that is, someone ruins everything by finding black swans in the Antipodes.

In his excellent book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands the idea of the Black Swan to any phenomenon which comes out of the blue, has a major impact, and which, in hindsight, is analysed to the point where its occurrence seems to have been almost inevitable. Example cited by Taleb include 9/11, World War I, and the advent of the PC and internet. To that list could be added the current financial crisis. Taleb argues that such events have a much larger effect on the world than is anticipated by traditional forecasting methods and by our hard-wired perception of the future.

Take as an example economic forecasts for Canada’s growth in GDP in 2010. According to the Bank of Canada, a growth rate of 3.8% is expected next year, a figure which is so incongruous that it looks suspiciously politically motivated. In comparison, the IMF expects growth of 1.6%, which seems more plausible at first sight. But what do these figures actually mean? What assumptions are they based upon? No more bank failures, one more failure, or how many exactly? Is the collapse of GM factored into the figures or not? How would they be affected by another large terrorist attack on North American soil, or an earthquake in San Francisco? How about a tsunami hitting Tokyo, or a bird flu pandemic? They may not be are not very cheery thoughts, but these and a myriad of other inherently unpredictable events and knife-edge outcomes in aggregate make these predictions worth less than the paper they’re written on. Economists may argue that the law of averages cancels out ‘external factors’, but this is patently untrue in the case of events of this magnitude. The economists are either fooling themselves, or just trying to fool us to keep their jobs intact.

Tetlock also noted in his analysis that the approach of the more successful forecasters differed significantly from the least successful. To explain the difference, he used the analogy of foxes and hedgehogs. According to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. In other words, for all the cunning a fox has, a hedgehog only needs one tactic (rolling into a ball) to frustrate it. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin used the distinction in his celebrated essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to categorise thinkers and writers according to whether their work was based on a unified, consistent view of the world, or whether they brought multiple perspectives into their work.

Tetlock, similarly, labeled as hedgehogs those experts whose predictions were based on the application of one big idea, and who did not waver in their beliefs when they made mistakes, but rather made excuses for their failures. Their in-depth specialization in their subject led them to try to force the square peg of their pet theories into the round holes of subjects where they didn’t fully apply, and thus negatively affected their forecasting capabilities.

Foxes, on the other hand, had no grand theory, but instead drew on a broad range of ideas to determine their prognosis, and were always eager to learn from their mistakes. Tetlock found that foxes were far better forecasters than hedgehogs on average. They may have still only had around a 60% success rate (being a fox does not help one predict black swans), but this was significantly better on average than the hedgehogs.

It should be noted, however, that hedgehogs tend to be far more controversial than foxes, and thus get more column inches and air-time. Television, in particular, loves to pit two hedgehogs with alternate world views against each other. It makes a far more dramatic spectacle than two foxes trying to understand each others’ opinions. This helps to explain the inverse relationship between fame and forecasting prowess.

So where does that leave the layperson in need of expert advice? Firstly, it is clear that one should be skeptical about the worth of any opinions coming from so-called experts. If you have a basic understanding of the subject, you can probably do just as good a job yourself. Tetlock recommends following the predictions of those with a proven track record of correct forecasting. As a caveat to this, however, I would say that this only counts if these predictions demonstrate the expert’s ability to be flexible in his or her outlook. For example, the media has lauded those few brave souls who predicted the current financial crisis. At least some of these, however will probably have been right just because they have an extreme pessimistic bias. Relying on such individuals to accurately predict the bottom of the slump almost certainly be very unwise.

The news that experts are little or no better at predicting the future than ourselves suggests that we don’t need them. Do not expect, however, for them to be thrown out on the street any time soon. Even if I had never heard of chaos theory, my observation of the unreliability of long-term weather forecasting would tell me that they are as good as useless beyond a window of about three days. Nevertheless, every day I check the seven day forecast.

It seems that our brains are so uncomfortable dealing with an undefined future that we will will gladly listen to anyone willing to predict it. For some it may be fortune tellers and tarot cards, for others it may be economists or political analysts. Either way, the reassurance of having some expected future to plan for seems far more important to us than the reliability of the forecast itself. Rather than mocking the experts, perhaps we should first look a little closer to home.

reCAPTCHAing the past

Boxes like the one above will be familiar, and perhaps frustrating, to anyone who logs on to websites these days. The text is often difficult to read, and I doubt that I am alone in often misreading the contents and guessing wrong on a regular basis. The test is, of course, meant to be hard. The idea is to provide something which is barely legible, so that computers cannot decipher the text but humans can. To do this, the text is deliberately distorted to the point where it often takes some effort to figure it out.

Such a box is known as a CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. In general, tests of this type are known as reverse Turing tests, after the mathematical genius and computing pioneer Alan Turing.

Sculpture of Alan Turing with apple in Manchester, England

In the course of his tragically short life, Alan Turing laid the foundations for the new field of computer science, broke the code of the German naval Enigma machine, thus saving countless lives in the Second World War, and came up with the test that bears his name. Even though computers were little more than a concept in his time, Turing was deeply interested in the potential of computing machines, and how far they could go toward thinking like humans. Rather than ask ‘can computers think?’, a question which he thought was mired in semantic problems, he came up with the idea that, if a computer could fool a human being into believing that it was communicating with another human, it could be said to be demonstrating ‘artificial’ human intelligence. He proposed that a test could be devised to determine whether a computer met this criteria, which became popularly know as a Turing Test.

In 1952 he was convicted of homosexuality, which was illegal in the UK at the time. In order to avoid prison, he was compelled to undergo hormonal injections to suppress his libido. He also lost his security clearance, which ended his career. On 8 June 1954, he was found dead with traces of cyanide in his system and a half eaten apple next to his bed (the bite out of Apple’s logo is rumoured to be a tribute to Turing). The death was ruled as suicide. Turing was 42 years old. Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Designing a test to reliably tell computers from humans  is precisely the problem facing internet security analysts. In the early days of the worldwide web, internet mail sites such as Hotmail and Yahoo! found that spammers could program computers to  set up multiple accounts, and use them to launch spam. Similarly, blogging  sites and internet forums were plagued by spammers plying their wares via comments and posts.

In 2000, Yahoo! started using CAPTCHAs designed by Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum to counter the spam threat. Computers could not read the images, and thus were not able to complete the log-in process. Von Ahn and Blum had designed a Turing test that stopped spammers in their tracks. The idea was soon taken on by many other popular websites.

Luis von Ahn, virtually

Luis von Ahn has become a highly influential figure in web thinking. Discover magazine named him one of the fifty best brains in science, and he was awarded a prestigious McArthur Fellowship in 2006 (also known as the Genius Award).

His principal area of study is the field of  human computation. Turning traditional thinking on its head, Von Ahn is interested in how humans can help computers to think. For example, humans look at an image and can immediately make out its constituent elements, whereas to a computer it is just a series of zeros and ones. Ideally a computer could tag photos uploaded to the internet so that humans could search for them by keyword, but there is no way currently that computers can do this. Von Ahn’s idea is to find ways to use human thinking power to achieve tasks like this. For example, he came up with the concept for the Google Image Labeler, which provides tags for google images by means of an online game. Two players work as a team, independently describing a series of photos, and are awarded points if they both come up with the same description. Google uses the information gained from this game to more accurately tag its stock of images so they can be found by its search engine.

In the light of his breakthroughs in human computation, von Ahn reconsidered the enormous aggregate human brain power being used to decode millions of his CAPTCHAs each day. It occurred to him that while millions of people every day were having to decode ambiguous text purely as part of a logon process, projects to convert old texts to digitised formats were foundering due to the shortcomings of their text recognition software. He decided to use his Genius Award grant to design a system which would allow CAPTCHAs to be usefully employed to assist in the conversion of old texts to digitised formats.

The limitations of optical character recognition (OCR)

The largest text digitisation project assisted by von Ahn’s reCAPTCHA process, as it is known, is run by the Open Content Alliance. The non-profit organisation has already converted over one million documents to digital format, all provided free of charge via their website. To digitise the documents, employees scan the pages of out-of-copyright texts, and the scanned images are then sent for optical character recognition (OCR) analysis. The analysis is about 90% accurate for newer books, but falls off to 60% for older texts. The unidentifiable text is then broken down into individual words and sent to participating websites as reCAPTCHAs. Two words, one which is already identified and which acts as a control, and an unidentified word, are presented to the user, having been stretched and distorted in ways which perplex computers but not people. The person logging in then enters both words. Correct recognition of the control word provides the login authorisation, but the user’s input for the other word is noted. Each unidentified word is served up a number of times until a consensus is reached as to what the word is. The process has a success rate of around 99.1%. The answer is then returned and inputted into the scanned text.

The reCAPTCHA service is provided free of charge to participating websites, which now include Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Stumbleupon and many more. Around 160 books’ worth of words are digitised every day through the process. ReCAPTCHA is also being used to digitise the entire archive of the New York Times, all the way back to 1851, which will be posted online with free access. Von Ahn’s goal is to digitise every out of copyright book and provide them all free of charge on the internet. This will keep us all busy logging in for a while, though. At the current rate of progress, the job will take 400 years to complete.